Big D, big dream: Dallas Opera has needed a new theater for decades. When will it open?

Dallas has never been reluctant to dream big, but follow-through has been a problem. As Jonathan Pell, the Dallas Opera's artistic administrator, points out, the inadequacy of Music Hall at Fair Park for opera has been talked about ever since the company's debut there, in 1957.

"Discussions of a new home for the opera began twenty-five years ago," Pell says. "When I came to the opera, in 1985, it was on the horizon--as soon as the Meyerson [Symphony Center] was finished, the next major arts facility would be a new opera house."

Name the things that could be wrong with an opera house, and the Music Hall qualifies. Fair Park is a charming complex of art-deco exhibition halls from the 1930s, but it's just far enough from downtown to be inconvenient, and even lifelong Dallasites get lost in the areas inscrutable maze of streets. The Music Hall is a drab, pseudo-Spanish colonial lump, with tacky additions from the 1970s. It has 3,420 seats in a broad wedge-of-pie configuration that has patrons joking about being in different Zip codes. The sound is surprisingly good up close, but it diffuses rapidly. The orchestra pit is cramped, the stage is only 39 feet deep, and backstage and wing space is nonexistent. (Fully-equipped modern stages typically are 58 to 75 feet deep, and present-day opera sets routinely require at least 50 feet behind the proscenium.) Backstage facilities for artists are in terrible condition.

Physical strictures rule out a good many of the more interesting productions the company would like to bring to Dallas. And the small, minimally equipped stage means the company can't do more than one production at a time. Artistically, Dallas Opera is comparable to Houston Grand Opera, but it hasn't had nearly the same profile, because--unlike in Houston--opera-lovers can't come in for a weekend and see two operas.

There's never a "good" time to be raising money for the performing arts, but the past year--between a general economic slowdown and the aftershocks of September 11--has been particularly challenging. In Dallas, though--at least officially--the word is that fund-raising for the planned Dallas Center for the Performing Arts is going well. As of the middle of June, only three months after the public phase of the fund-raising was kicked off, the project had pledges of $122.4 million toward a $250-million goal.

The immediate plans are for two new performance facilities near the thirteen-year-old Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, and the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Foundation has tapped two internationally acclaimed architects to design them. London-based Foster and Partners, whose highest-profile recent project has been the domed renovation of the Berlin Reichstag, are planning a 2,400-seat lyric theater as the new home for the Dallas Opera and Fort Worth Dallas Ballet, which can also be used as a venue for touring shows needing full proscenium stage facilities. Acoustical design will be by Robert Essert, formerly with Artec Consultants. Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (whose recent projects include the Prada store in New York's Soho and two Guggenheim museums in Las Vegas) are designing an 800-seat multiform theater to be used by the Dallas Theater Center, Dallas Black Dance Theatre and others. Preliminary designs should be in hand sometime this fall.

When completed, the new facilities will round out an arts district of unparalleled architectural profile. Lined up along Flora Street, on the northeast corner of the downtown freeway loop, the district already includes the Meyerson Symphony Center, a cool modernist landmark designed by I. M. Pei, and Edward Larrabee Barnes's stern Dallas Museum of Art. The Nasher Sculpture Center, designed by Renzo Piano to provide both indoor and outdoor display for an important collection of modern sculpture assembled by Dallas developer Raymond Nasher, is due to open in May 2003. A major expansion of the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts is being planned, with completion projected for around 2005.